Last week, I focused on the concept of how food can be medicine and how what you choose to eat can be one of the most important lifestyle choices a person makes in influencing health. But it is far from the only thing.

For more than a decade, the American Heart Association has urged people to follow their list of "Life's Simple 7," a checklist for maintaining cardiovascular health. High up on that list is maintaining a nutritious diet. Also recommended are things like avoiding smoking and getting adequate physical activity. In June, for the first time the list was expanded to "Life's Essential 8" to make room for an important, though less-recognized, pillar of cardiovascular health: good sleep. The change was prompted by research published in the Journal of the American Heart Association demonstrating sleep's deserved elevated status.

Says Nour Makarem, lead author of the study and assistant professor of epidemiology at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, "We spend a third of our life sleeping ... It's so important to preserving so many aspects of our health and functioning."

In a perfect world, we would get the proper amount of deep sleep each night and wake up refreshed and ready to take on the day. But these are not perfect times, are they?

Say you're tossing and turning at night. You may be among the nearly 70 million other Americans who are finding getting a good night's sleep hard to come by. As reported by Newsweek, that's the number of folks who suffer from some form of chronic sleep disorder. According to a Sleep Foundation study, 35.2% of all adults in the U.S. also report sleeping less than seven hours per night. Nearly half of all Americans say they feel sleepy during the day between three and seven days per week.

The consequences for not getting enough sleep can be severe. "People who don't get enough deep sleep can develop symptoms of depression, seizures, high blood pressure and migraines. It can even impact immunity, increasing the likelihood of illness and infection," says the Newsweek report. One of the causes depriving us from getting enough sleep is increases in stress and its association with increased anxiety.

One small 2017 study published in the journal Scientific Reports goes so far as to say that we are not only living in anxiety inducing times, but like how you can catch a cold or the flu, it is possible to "catch anxiety." Given how the human brain is wired, "it's all too easy for us to 'catch' emotions," Carla Marie Manly, a clinical psychologist and wellness expert based in Sonoma County, California, says in a recent Health.com report.

The idea of stress and anxiety being contagious has been suggested in past research, according to Health.com reporter Stephanie Booth. "Whether listening to a friend vent about their job troubles or watching a TV interview with survivors of a natural disaster ... specialized brain cells called mirror neurons may play a role in our tendency to soak up anxiety from external sources," she writes. "Everyone experiences stress and anxiety — some of it we have control over; some of it we don't. And sometimes we take on other people's anxiety."

"In 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic's disastrous ripple effect ... increased rates of depression and anxiety over the world by almost 25%," says the self-development and relationships blog site Mind Essential.

"Following an exhaustive assessment of data from numerous studies, researchers calculated that the prevalence of major depressive disorder (MDD) and anxiety disorders has grown by 28% and 26%, respectively since last year's pandemic began," they report.

According to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, anxiety disorders are "the most prevalent mental ailment in the United States, affecting 40 million persons aged 18 and older, or 18.1% of the population."

If you accept the idea that issues of stress and anxiety have been super-charged for adults in the world in which we now live, what is it doing to kids entering their teen years, a time when one's identity and personality are still being formed? Under the best of circumstances, it is a social anxiety-inducing time for them.

As reported by The New York Times, according to a study published last month in the journal PLOS ONE, "covid has not only reshaped the way we work and connect with others, but has also redrawn the way we are." Some of the most pronounced effects are among young adults.

"The authors of the personality study relied on data from the Understanding America Study, an ongoing internet panel at the University of Southern California that first began collecting survey answers in 2014, drawing upon publicly available data from about 7,000 participants who responded to a personality assessment administered before and during the pandemic," writes the Times' Christine Chung.

"Key personality traits may have dimmed so that we have become less extroverted and creative, not as agreeable and less conscientious," says the study. "If these changes are enduring, this evidence suggests population-wide stressful events can slightly bend the trajectory of personality, especially in younger adults," the study concludes.

Anviksha Kalscheur is a Chicago-based marriage & family therapist who also runs a teen support program. "Connection, attachment and interaction with others are critical to developing personality," Kalscheur tells the Times. "You're at that stage of development, where they're not getting those cues, those attachments, those learning, like all those different pieces that happen that you don't even often think about," she says.

The paper's lead author, Angelina Sutin, a professor at Florida State University's College of Medicine, emphasized that the findings captured "one snapshot in time" and could be temporary. The authors were "appropriately cautious" in their conclusions and on emphasizing the need for further study to re-examine the findings," notes the Times. "It is hard to pinpoint exactly what it was about the pandemic that led to these changes," says Sutin.

Write to Chuck Norris ([email protected]) with your questions about health and fitness. Follow Chuck Norris through his official social media sites, on Twitter @chucknorris and Facebook's "Official Chuck Norris Page." He blogs at http://chucknorrisnews.blogspot.com. To find out more about Chuck Norris and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

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